As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
In a data center comprising multiple information handling systems, there is often a desire to gather configuration and status information, and create maps from this information to define a complete power and information technology equipment infrastructure or topology of the data center. Having a map of such topology may assist in data center management, allowing removal of guess work in determining a data center's power needs, reclamation of trapped power, and avoiding unscheduled downtime.
Such configuration and status information may include at least two types of data. One type of data is data regarding individual information handling system hardware configuration, such as computing load and power consumption, etc. which may be used to optimize system resource mapping. Another type of data is a physical power mapping between one or more power distribution units and individual power supply units, which may be used for balancing loads on each alternating current phase in order to optimize power sourcing. Existing approaches to such mapping typically involve manual entry of mapping the server rack location and its corresponding power distribution unit and power distribution outlet in a table or other data structure. Such manual data entry may be costly, time consuming, and prone to error.